PuTTY wish ecdsa

summary: Support for ECDSA keys in PuTTY and PuTTYgenclass: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.difficulty: tricky: Needs many tuits.priority: medium: This should be fixed one day.fixed-in: 2014-11-03 53ff0ffd55dcefbdc8ddd7a4a4090e5925b95dd5 (0.68)

RFC 5656 defines
elliptic-curve (ECDSA) key formats (host and user) for use with SSH-2,
and associated ECDH key exchange methods. OpenSSH has supported these
since 5.7.

PuTTY does not currently support these. It probably should.

The only niggle I (OSD) have is that I'm not 100% sure what the patent
situation is. (Wikipedia has
some words on
the subject.)

A user reports
that the French government computing security agency
ANSSI has
recommendations
for configuring OpenSSH that prefer use of ECDSA keys.

2014-11: the development snapshots now include support for
the mandatory parts of RFC5656: that is, ECDSA host and user keys
and ECDH key exchange, with the curves nistp256, nistp384, and
nistp521.

(This support is not included in PuTTY 0.64; however, a release
labelled as 0.64 but erroneously built from the wrong source code was
briefly available. If you have a version of PuTTY claiming to be 0.64
and to support ECDH/ECDSA, you should download a fresh copy, not least
because the erroneous version is missing security fixes to unrelated
code.)